If
you lack a written strategy, a one-page plan is a great place to begin. If you
have a detailed strategy but struggle to gain traction, boiling it down to one
page will make it easier. A one-page strategy can help you:
- Crystallize your content
marketing strategy
- Gain stronger buy-in more
quickly from executives or clients
- Keep content producers
strategically aligned
Get started
To
create a content marketing strategy in one page, first focus on what the
organization needs to accomplish in the next year.
How
to ascertain this information depends on your environment. Whether you engage
C-level executives, read the company’s internal and external documents
(including the overall marketing plan), or use another research avenue, you
should identify:
- Company’s growth strategy
- Revenue growth targets (as a
percent or dollar figure over last year)
- Profit targets (as a percent or
monetary amount per share over last year)
- How growth will be achieved
(e.g., new product launch, add-on sales to existing customers, new
markets, acquisition, new customers, increase in market share)
- Other factors or criteria
important to the organization’s growth
These
business-level elements will appear in your plan as:
1.
Objectives: What qualitative results must the
company accomplish over the next year?
2.
Goals: How will progress toward objectives
be measured quantitatively?
Next,
work with mid-level marketing, sales, and product leaders to sketch a content
marketing plan. How will content marketing help the company achieve its goals?
You may find some ideas that content marketing can support, and others that it
can’t. What content marketing can support will appear in your plan as:
3.
Strategies: What will the content marketing
function deliver qualitatively during the next year (e.g., introduce a new
product, increase awareness, dramatize your solution’s differentiation)?
4.
Metrics: How will marketing measure the
achievement of content marketing strategies (e.g., increase awareness by a
certain percent, deliver specified number of marketing-qualified leads to
sales, contribute a certain dollar amount to the sales pipeline from qualified
leads, produce a certain amount of revenue)?
Don’t
shy away from revenue goals. It’s bracing to have quantified goals to meet, but
quotas bring a clear finish line and value to all content marketing activities.
They measure the sales pipeline, customers won, and revenue generated. These
are the metrics executives really care about.
Take it to the executives
Now
that you have completed the first four parts of the plan, present the draft to
the executives and middle managers. Walk through the plan step by step and
discuss it immediately, face to face. Be open to questions and input. Be
succinct. Be wise – narrow the scope of discussion to avoid misunderstandings
or setbacks. The results of their input will help you sharpen the plan, but you
still must keep it to one page.
Through
your exchanges, you’ll learn that most executives care about the financial
numbers. As one CEO put it, “When you come into my office, I see either a penny
of expense or a penny of profit on your forehead.” They want to know:
- Content marketing costs
- Revenue planned to be generated
and by what date
- Profit produced based on
company or product margins
- Targeted return ROI for content
marketing
Work
toward a straightforward understanding with your executives – a simple and
scalable marketing model. For instance, I reached this understanding with a
CFO: For every $3 in revenue generated by marketing, the company would spend an
additional dollar on marketing. The more revenue generated by marketing, the
more budget it would have to spend.
Align content creators
I
pin the agreed-upon one-page plan above my computer screen and encourage my
team to do the same. Use the plan as a litmus test for ideas. Let it simplify
decisions about which content goes forward.
As
you well know, all your agencies, freelancers, reporters, writers, and digital
and social experts need to work from the same content marketing strategy. When
it’s only one page, they’re far likelier to use it day to day than they would a
multi-page document.
In
addition to one-page strategies, content creators also need:
- One-page message map
- Buyer personas
- Understanding of the buyers’ journey
- Editorial calendar
Template example
This
content marketing strategy template fits on one side of standard printer paper.
If you absolutely need more space, use legal-sized paper or even an 11- by
17-inch piece. The important thing is to keep it to a single page that can be
easily shared to maximize its impact and usefulness with executives and content
creators.
Content
Marketing One-Page Plan
Objectives:
1.
Increase revenue from product X over the next 12 months.
2.
Position this disruptive new product as a viable alternative to (competitor’s
product).
Goals:
1.
Increase revenue by X% to X% in 2015.
2.
Build buyer awareness to XX%.
Strategy:
1.
Become the best source of information on (customer problem or product
category).
2. Deliver
useful information and thought-provoking insights.
3.
Educate buyers on:
- How to address key technology
and business challenges
- How to generate revenue, reduce
expenses, and improve user experiences
Metrics:
1.
Increase website traffic +XX% year over year.
2.
Convert XX% of website users. (You may track soft conversions and/or hard
conversions.)
3.
Add to the sales pipeline XXXX marketing-qualified leads per year, including
$YY million in potential deals.
4.
Generate revenue of $X million.
Who
we serve: Capsule version of buyer personas
What’s
in it for buyers? Ideas to further buyers’ careers and
their companies’ success
Topics: List topics where the company seeks to position its
helpful content.
Serving
sizes & frequencies
Time (to get message across) Words
Media
7 seconds
23
Headline,
tweet, sound bite, cartoon (daily)
2
minutes
400
Web page, blog, news release, video, infographic (2X/week)
5
minutes
1,000
Magazine article, contributed articles, long video (monthly)
20+
minutes
4,000+
White paper,
application note, eBook, speech, webinar (quarterly)
If you want to build an
authoritative website in search engines, one which ranks high across multiple
pages, then you need to create strong relationships among your pages.
In other words, you need to
create authority for specific pages, optimizing each page for a specific set of
keywords before that authority is lifted to the domain.
Here’s how to do that:
Link
a cluster of pages by topic – In other words,
strategically link pages about “Search engine optimization” to other pages
about “SEO.” Link pages about “social media tools” to other pages about “social
media tools.” If you link a page on social media tools to a page on SEO, then
that link will be less relevant.
Send
more links to one particular page – Inside that cluster, link
to one page in particular (what I like to call the hero page) from the other
topical pages. The percentage of links this page gets should be about four
times higher than the rest of the pages get.
Send
domain-based external links to hero pages – When I say external,
I mean pages outside of that topical cluster. This could be your Home or About
page. Think about pages higher in site architecture.
Avoid
cannibalizing keywords – Produce as many variants on a keyword
as there are pages pointing to the hero page. You will dilute the effectiveness
of a keyword if you don’t. For example, say I have a hero page on marketing
ideas for small businesses. And say I have 26 pages inside this topical
cluster: the hero page and 25 other supporting pages. It would be a mistake to
use the keyword phase “marketing ideas for small businesses” on all those pages
pointing to the hero page. Instead, you should create keyword variations on
that phrase.
Drive
external links to the hero page from relevant websites -
Backlinks are still the backbone of search, but getting other sites to link to
you is another story. You cannot control this process; you can only influence
it by attracting high authority links.
Locate
links high on a page - When creating links on the pages
supporting your hero page, the higher they are on the page, the more weight and
credibility they will receive.
Fix
broken pages - Like broken links, these can send bad
signals to search engines. Identify the broken links fix them or 301 redirect
to a better page.
Finding your niche - make a
good marketing approach to inspire trust, and having enough valid materials to
back up those claims. Another possible scenario is that you are already good at
something, but lack the necessary advertising approach for your business to
bloom. The following article will clarify what are the current most lucrative
approaches to online marketing.
Creating
a website
Nowadays, a website is
absolutely essential, however, just because you need one does not mean that
simply having one will improve your chances. In fact, a poor website design
will do more harm than good. If you
intend to sell products, then having an online shop will play a crucial role in
your success. Recent studies show how 72% of the consumer’s body is actually
using the internet in order to research and purchase a particular product,
these are usually millennials, age 25-34, meaning, more than half of your
target audience will most likely find you online, and as we all know, first
impressions matter.
Of course, creating a
website is merely a first step. All you need to do is find a good designer,
find a good available domain name, and a satisfying web hosting service. Once
you have all the aforementioned ingredients, you can proceed to the next step –
creating website content and advertising. After all, this is a growing market.
It is predicted that online shopping retail will spike up to $370 billion in
2017. This all means that it is fertile ground for investments, but it also
means that the competition is tough, thus you need to make sure every step is
executed and implemented correctly.
Content
creation
Based on the content on your
website, people will assess you, but most importantly, Google will rank you.
Needless to say just how much people trust Google’s judgment, since it is the
most powerful web browser today. You can no longer get away with keyword
stuffing, you must create relevant content with valuable insights. This is why
web designers are extremely busy. It has become a full time job and one worthy
of your budget. Truth be told, if you are a web designer, there is a bright and
profitable future ahead of you. Simply put yourself into the shoes of a
customer - would you trust a provider with poor web design and poorly written
product descriptions? It only looks like someone who is desperate to sell
products that nobody wants. With a design of greater aesthetic value, you can
properly repackage the merchandise and increase their chances of sale.
Now let us address the
specifics of content design. Your website should contain written content, and
video content, since they are both sharable and linkable, and you should do
this for the purpose of advertising, but this issue will be tackled later. As
far as written content is concerned, it was already mentioned how keyword
stuffing is a rude and outdated technique. Studies have revealed how the best
approximate length for a text that targets a specific keyword, should be around
2000 words. Moreover, make sure the text is insightful and relevant to the
topic, because context is evaluated as well. In other words, do not write
something solely for the sake of writing it.
Video content has a great
degree of importance in quality online advertising. Unlike text, a video can be
made to be much more engaging, plus the retention capacity of the viewer is
greater than the one of the reader. The text can be written in the an engaging
manner, however it can sometimes diminish the amount of relevant data that you
can convey. Videos are much better teachers than text, and due to visual aids,
they’ll grasp attention with ease.
According to Cisco System,
this trend will remain popular, and it is firmly believed that by the year
2018, almost 90% of global internet traffic will be attributed to videos. To
support this claim, simply look at YouTube. It has become the 2nd
largest search engine, which means that it is bigger than Yahoo, Bingo, ALO and
Ask, combined. Even Facebook has invested into becoming a video marketing
platform, only proving the claim how videos are potent tools for both starting
and older businessmen. Here are some metrics to solidify the claim:
- There are over 4 billion views on a daily basis on Facebook
- In April, 2015 BuzzFeed’s video view count went over 500 million views.
- 35% of customers are reached via videos on Facebook, only 4% are reached via text and 14% via photos
Advertising
tactics
This section is going to
cover how to efficiently advertise yourself, or your line of work online, as
well as how you can earn money while advertising other entrepreneurs via the
same means. Let us cover the most efficient form of online marketing
first, also known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is a great way to
tackle the issue of a websites domain authority and there are many means by
which you contribute to this cause.
Blogging and linking –
Blogging is one of the most profitable hobbies nowadays, provided that you are
a good writer with a great amount of insight in a particular niche. Bloggers
are frequently hired to create the type of content mentioned in the first part
of the article. First of all, the content created on your site needs to be
valid linkable material, meaning your content won’t be perceived as spam when
used for the purposes of “guest blogging” (writing on other blogs that have
topics closely related to your niche).
This is a very subtle and
very powerful form of marketing, as long as you do everything right. Bloggers
and ghostwriters are hired via various job platforms, to create quality content
for websites, blogs, and for guest blogging. This resulted in 40% more bloggers
than in August 2010, also 50% of all internet users read blog posts more than
once a day. Almost 40% of US companies used blogging for advertising purposes
in August 2010 - this number is probably much higher now.
It is also worth mentioning
how using wrong or so called “forced” SEO can actually backfire and harm your
website. We have already established that spamming is one of those castigated
tactics, thus you should no longer use single keywords but rather focus on long
tail keywords. These phrases are less popular, meaning they can rank with more
ease. Use “leather belts for men” rather than just “belts” or “belt”. Finally
when guest blogging, don’t use the same anchor text, and don’t link your
content on irrelevant blogs - this kind of linking will only harm your domain
authority.
Sharing your content -
Photos, videos and written content are to be shared on social media sites, in
order to create some social buzz. Around 84% of marketers use social media for
advertising purposes, this is also known as social media marketing. This also
means that, if you have a lot of followers on your social media profiles, you
are likely to be contacted to share or promote certain content. In other words,
if you are social network enthusiast, your time spent online might not go to
waste. This is why vloggers have become extremely popular on YouTube.
The problem with social
media marketing is that you can’t directly measure the success which is
achieved by using it. However, 42% of marketers claim that Facebook is actually
quite an essential element of advertising. Facebook can be quite an ally when
it comes to finding your target audience, people leave their personal info,
their place of residence, occupations and hobbies, when making a profile. When you use Facebook to boost your posts and
create a buzz, you can target certain groups of people, thus making sure the
right audience will actually see your post.
Meta tags and good descriptions –
When posting content, like videos or pictures on your site or on YouTube, make
sure you enrich it with all the relevant meta tags in the description. To
accurately decide on these tags, search for the product you want to sell, see
what comes up first, find out what were the meta tags on that item, and use
them to optimize your product.
When it comes to
descriptions, they need to be unique - having the same text on more than one
page on your website will reflect negatively on your website. Furthermore, do
not copy descriptions from other websites - unique means that they can’t be
found via copyscape.
Content network delivery –
If you want your website to become more widespread, you can use content
delivery network services for it to become uploaded on more than one server.
This localizes the site on more than one place, it makes the streaming service
much more responsive, and it positively influences the responsiveness of the
entire website. The more servers you occupy, the greater the chances of your
site appearing first when someone conducts a Google search.
SEO for Bing, Ask, Yahoo, AOL and mobile
devices – Even though Google is the leading search
engine, Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL are also used, and it wouldn’t be a flawed
initiative to optimize for those engines as well.
To increase the popularity
of your site, make sure it is optimized for mobile platforms. This will have a
positive impact on authority, plus 37% of consumers are more likely to
participate in a transaction on a website that is mobile-optimized. Over 61% of
companies have either optimized or created a new website optimized for mobile
platforms.
